A Garden of One's Own, or, Book Review: Return to the Secret Garden (Return to the Secret Garden Blog Tour)

The Secret Garden is one of my favourite books of all time. It's certainly my most reread book, my copy boasts a heavily creased cover and spine as well as yellowed, torn pages. When I was a teenager I had a habit of reading just my favourite scenes in books over and over, so until quite recently it had a bookmark in it at the scene where Colin gives a lecture about Magic. When I reread it in preparation for Return for the Secret Garden, I was slightly underwhelmed by that scene - I'd mythologised it in my head, remembered it as longer, more dramatic.

That's what I do with my favourite parts of my favourite books and films and songs, especially when I haven't revisited them in a while. Those scenes or dramatic moments become bigger to me than they are, and I forget the rest of what made them so great. As I reread, or rewatch, or relisten, I reevaluate it, and the thing as a whole, and this often leads to surprising revelations. See my previous post about Harriet the Spy - in that case I thought I loved best the parts about sneaking around and spying on people, but it was the stuff about writing that really sunk in.

Anyway, remembering that scene so fondly, I thought what I loved most about The Secret Garden was the Magic. Wrong again! As an adult, reading it, I realised what actually I loved most is the secret garden! (And this isn't just because I've recently become obsessed with plants.) I love seeing private spaces. Photographs of lived-in houses. Scenes in films with carefully constructed and personalised rooms - the teenage bedroom, the shop the character owns and decorated themselves. At night, on the top deck of a bus, I look out for open curtains and gleefully stare into other people's houses.

Mary Lennox is a girl who doesn't have anything of her own, a space where she can be herself. Her bedroom is a place she is brought to and taken out of on the orders of others - but the garden she finds by herself. It's her sanctuary. On this reread, I was actually slightly disappointed when she starts letting other people in!

My much-loved copy of the original book. View on Instagram.

Return to the Secret Garden is set thirty years after the original, and follows another young girl's search for a place where she belongs. Emmie has never really had a proper space of her own. She lives at an orphanage, where she shares a dormitory with other girls. To snatch some privacy, she climbs through a window onto a rickety old fire escape. It's there she meets a stray cat, the first thing she has that's really hers (as much as a cat can be owned!). But then along comes the Second World War, and the orphanage is evacuated. Emmie has to leave her cat behind and travel a long way to a strange old house in Yorkshire, one Misselthwaite Manor.

I was a little apprehensive about reading a sequel to a book I love so much, but I found Return to the Secret Garden charming. It was great to see another little girl find a kind of home in the garden, even though it's no longer locked, and she has even less right to it than Mary, being an unconnected orphan, rather than the niece of the manor's owner.

Like Mary, she is grumpy and sometimes rude, but also very determined once she gets an idea in her head, and I loved all these characteristics in Mary. Many people prefer Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess to The Secret Garden, but I am a Secret Garden person through and through. It helped that I actually owned a copy of The Secret Garden. I read A Little Princess one time and returned the book to the library. I  saw the film once for my birthday. That was enough (though when I rewatched it as an adult, it did make me cry).

Sara, the 'little princess', is too good to be relatable, she's always kind and sweet, no matter what happens. Whereas Mary gave me hope - that even if I wasn't perfect, I could be likable, and I could try and improve. Emmie is the same. She's an orphan, but she is neither tediously pathetic or overly good. She seems realistic, as do all the children, who fight and fall out but ultimately help each other out.

My least favourite part was seeing the children of The Secret Garden as adults, but that might be only because I have never ever imagined them grown up! I think children reading this after the original won't find it jarring at all.

I'm sure I would have enjoyed reading Return to the Secret Garden as a child - it takes some of the best features of the original and puts them into a familiar yet strikingly altered setting. It's a cute, quick read. Many thanks to Scholastic for sending me a review copy (it's a particularly gorgeous little hardback) and to Faye Rogers for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

Have you ever read a sequel to a children's classic that wasn't by the original author? What did you think? Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour and enter the giveaway! Yes, Scholastic are giving away a copy of The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett and a copy of Return to the Secret Garden by Holly Webb to one lucky blog tour follower!


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Book Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Prachett (Farewell Terry Prachett Blog Tour)

Tiffany Aching's witch training is going pretty well until she is taken to watch the Dark Morris, the opposite of the better-known spring time morris dance, performed to bring the winter to the land. Bored and distracted, she finds herself giving into temptation and joining the dance, where she comes to the attention of the Wintersmith, an elemental, and he falls in love with her, threatening to plunge the world into eternal winter if she cannot work out how to stop him.

But this isn't all Tiffany has to worry about - her current mentor, Miss Treason, is a witch feared by many, a woman shrouded by legend - skulls and spiderwebs decorate her house, there's allegedly a demon in her basement, and she has a clock instead of a heart. And of course the Nac Mac Feegles are still protecting her, stealing food, and reading her diary...

It has been a few years since I read the previous Tiffany Aching book - A Hat Full of Sky - and I found that I remembered characters better than plot details, so I did have to read the Wikipedia summaries of the previous two books. However, I wouldn't worry about having to do this as there aren't that many references to the previous two books - the most important thing you need to do to enjoy Wintersmith is to remember who everyone is!

With characters this memorable, it's not a struggle at all, and for me Wintersmith was all about the characters. If I remember the other books correctly, I preferred the plots of the last two, but Wintersmith would be well worth reading just to learn more about the witches and see more of the Feegles! I loved all the little details that are thrown in because they're funny, even if they have nothing to do with the plot - like Horace the living cheese.

I hope you enjoyed this review - do check out the other #terryprachettblogtour posts. Now, I really must read I Shall Wear Midnight soon...

Book Review: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

My own silver shoes.

You know how this one goes. A young girl named Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, are carried by a cyclone to the strange land of Oz, where she makes friends with a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, and a cowardly Lion, and goes on a quest to find her way home.

I went to see the musical Wicked last year and I decided to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz beforehand to remind myself what happened in the story as I knew it. It's a children's book, so I knew it would be a short read, and although I'd read various picture-book versions of the story, and had seen the film, I'd never read the original story before, and I was curious. Lots of other people seem to have read the entire Oz series in their childhoods and loved it, so I downloaded the first book onto my Nook and started reading it.

It's odd. I couldn't tell if it was meant to be satirical - for most of the book there's so little humour that it seems like it could all be a joke - the characters are so one-dimensional that it seems silly! It's a relief each of the few times the author makes a joke about this - the best are at the end, when Glinda lets loose with the puns.

It is very similar to the film adaptation and all the picture book versions I'd read. There's a few extra details, but the biggest change is that the ruby slippers are silver shoes!

Because I knew the plot and I didn't find the writing endearing, I stopped reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz after a couple of days. I only resumed reading it a couple of days ago, when I'd finished reading another book while on the train.

I'm glad I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it's far from a favourite, and I wouldn't say there's much in it that will interest adults, though I think it will stay a children's classic, being a fairytale with a few twists. Apparently, the style of the other books is quite different so I will keep an open mind and try reading the first of the many sequels, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

As these books are in the public domain, you can download them from the links below for free:
Download L. Frank Baum's books from Project Gutenberg
Download audio versions of L. Frank Baum's books from LibriVox

I also wanted to pick out a print edition of this book to link to here, and was amazed by the cool stuff available. I've put a few of the most interesting below (affiliate links). The 'Classics Reimagined' edition looks like a work of modern art, whereas the Osborne Illustrated Originals version would have been my pick as a child! But if I was going to have any version of this book it would be the Annotated version, because I am a complete nerd and I think it would be really interesting! I'll have to check the libraries.


Have you read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and/or any of the other Oz books? What did you think?

Bookish Brits Vlog 5: Childhood Christmas Favourites

SANTA HAT!

Books mentioned in this video:

The Night Before Christmas - A Changing Picture and Lift-the-Flap Book (Pop-up Books)
Christmas Activity Book (Activity Books)
The New Christmas Fun Book
Christmas: The Complete Kit

Bookish Brits Vlog 2: My Favourite Childhood Books

This actually went up on Monday, but I've been so busy redecorating and NaNoing I haven't had time to put up a post about it!

Click here to read a post explaining more about how influential Harriet the Spy was for me.

Book Review: Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson

Photo by Mark Dumont.

It's 1910 and young Maia Fielding lives at a boarding school in London until her guardian announces that some relatives of hers have been found. She and her new governess, Miss Minton, travel all the way to the Amazon to live with her unpleasant new family, the Carters, who appear to detest everything about Brazil. Maia, on the other hand, is utterly enchanted by her new home and is keen to make new friends and explore. Soon she finds herself caught up in the mystery of Bernard Taverner's missing son...

This is the first book by Eva Ibbotson that I have read. I picked it up on a whim, loved it completely, and now I want to read them all. Seriously. I am considering tracking down a copy of every one of her books, building a fort, and hiding out there to read and read and read until I have devoured Eva Ibbotson's entire ouvre.I want to hand out copies of Journey to the River Sea to every child I meet! And probably a few adults too. I loved it that much. And so quickly! I even included a quote from the first chapter in my Top Ten Favourite Book Quotes post.

The narrative voice is funny and charming and snarky. The characters were colourful and varied. I loved Maia's innocence and ingenuity, Miss Minton's sneakiness and dignity, Clovis' nervousness and the greediness of the twins. The main plot and all the subplots were just fabulous.

I'm no historical expert but I spotted a couple of anachronistic details in the story. Nothing really jarring, just a couple of things I noticed, and I know some people are fussy about accuracy, so I wanted to include a warning!

Being a children's novel Journey to the River Sea was quite a quick read, but it was just what I needed to make the time I spent commuting speed by! I would recommend it to EVERYBODY.

Now It All Makes Sense, or, Book Review: Harriet the Spy

edenpictures at flickr went around taking photographs of places from Harriet the Spy - I am quite jealous. This is the corner on which the Dei Santi Grocery Store, part of Harriet's spy route, is supposed to be.

One book that I should have included in this post, but forgot to, even though I was reminded to reread it by seeing the author’s birthday written in my diary, is Harriet the Spy.

Harriet the Spy was one of my absolute most favourite books as a child. My copy has been so well-loved that both corners of the front cover have big creases through them, and the cover actually reads “har___t the spy” as a big piece of the glossy top layer has peeled off. The spine has a great big crease, and several little ones.

I was totally in awe of Harriet, every time I read the book. I thought it was amazing that Harriet spied on people, and wanted to be a spy and a writer when she grew up. My previous obsession – magic tricks – was almost completely eclipsed by an interest in spying. After being disappointed by the film, I proceeded to hold a grudge against Michelle Trachtenberg all the way through her time in Buffy. I was not put off obtaining a few items of tie-in merchandise, such as a spying pack that included a folder and a notebook made to look like Harriet’s in the film. I got a few books about codes out of the library. I bought another at a school book fair. Filofax were bringing out a couple of different versions of FunFax, the Filofax for kids, each year, and of course I had to have the spy one. I was too timid and sensible to start up a spy route of my own, but I used to open my bedroom window and sit on my bed for half an hour at a time, making notes about what I saw in the back gardens and on the little bit of road that I could glimpse.

I remembered all these things before re-reading Harriet the Spy. I didn’t expect to discover that it had influenced me even more than I could remember.

Harriet the Spy is the story of Harriet M. Welsch, an eleven year old girl who has been encouraged by her nanny, Ole Golly, in her dreams of becoming a writer when she grows up. Ole Golly told her that she needs to find out as much as she can about everything, and Harriet takes this to mean everyone. Harriet is almost constantly making notes on everything she sees, hears, and thinks, at home, at school, and even when she goes out for egg creams. She even has a spy route scheduled into her daily routine, so that she can spy on several of her neighbours. Her comfortable life is severely disrupted when firstly, Ole Golly leaves, and secondly, her classmates get hold of her notebook.

At the time I didn’t really care much about the moral of the book because I knew I would never let anyone know I was writing about them. I’m sure that I learnt some things from it, however, as I religiously avoided gossip until adulthood. Rereading Harriet the Spy, it seemed like a startlingly strong message for a children’s book to have, it’s not sugar-coated in any way, but demonstrated starkly, just like the message in Nobody’s Family Is Going To Change. I think that this is what is so great about Louise Fitzhugh’s writing – it’s entertaining, but she doesn’t hold back, she warns the reader about the world, and offers them hope for surviving it.

I gasped when I read the description of Ole Golly’s yellow room – yellow used to be my favourite colour. Maybe The Boy With The Purple Socks is behind my switch to a love of purple? When I read the words ‘egg cream’ I remembered imagining an egg yolk floating in cream. Later I thought maybe it was an old term for ice cream. I had totally forgotten all this. It’s neither (via Purple Socks). And like Harriet, I have practically always seen writing as my WORK. I used to tell my parents that I was WORKING without any recollection of Harriet doing the same thing.

Basically, I am a bit Harriet, and Harriet is a bit me, in a chicken and egg kind of way. I had a fantastic time discovering this, and you should all go read Harriet the Spy, now. Me? I'm going to read the sequels - I had no idea they existed until recently. A new treat.

Harriet-related links:
'Unapologetically Harriet, the Misfit Spy' at NPR - radio show discussing the novel and how unusual it was at the time it was published.
'Confessions of a Starvingartist: Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet The Spy”' at Canonball - a much better post than mine about the way the writer has been influenced by the book.

Book Review: Nobody's Family Is Going To Change, by Louise Fitzhugh

Today is the birthday of one of my favourite childhood authors, Louise Fitzhugh (October 5, 1928 - November 19, 1974). She is most famous for writing the children's classic Harriet the Spy, however, I haven't re-read that recently, so I decided to review it next year. Today I am going to review Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, which I read for the first time last year and mentioned in my guest post on Once Upon a Bookcase for Body Image and Self-Perception Month.

Nobody's Family Is Going to Change has two main characters, Emma and Willie, an eleven year old girl and seven year old boy from a middle-class African American family. Louise Fitzhugh was writing ahead of her time with this novel, which was published in 1974 - their father is a lawyer and the family cook is white. Emancipation 'Emma' Sheridan (what a fabulous name) is passionately in love with the idea of being a lawyer, like her father, but he doesn't approve of women lawyers. Emma's mother tells her that she needs to lose weight and grow up to be beautiful so that she can marry a lawyer. Emma watches court programmes on television, reads law textbooks, and fantasises about being older, taller, and winning cases against her father. Whilst wearing a large, dramatic hat.

Willie wants to be a dancer, like his uncle, Dipsey, his mother's brother. One day he goes to an audition, and gets a part on stage. He is delighted, but again, his father disapproves. Mr Sheridan wants Willie to be a lawyer - he believes that dancing is demeaning. At his age, all Willie can do is beg his mother to intervene on his behalf, but Emma looks elsewhere. One day she finds out about the Children's Army, an activist group for children, and goes to a meeting, reluctantly hoping to find a solution there.

The title of this book is its own spoiler, in a way. This isn't a story in which the parents are proved wrong, and everybody ends up all happy and close at the end. Nobody's Family Is Going to Change is about self-acceptance, and finding other sources of encouragement and support, if those you look to first aren't willing to give any. The Children's Army helps Emma, but not in the way she hoped and expected.

I think it's a great read because the characters are so fantastic yet also flawed. Emma is intelligent and funny but like Harriet M. Welsch, she isn't sweet, nice, or stereotypically girly. Emma is very angry about her situation, and she takes that out on her brother. She is very critical of herself but also other people, which I think is very true to life. If you are constantly judged by other people and found wanting, it's likely that you will take that on board and become very judgemental yourself. Willie is more innocent and good-hearted, but his energy and enthusiasm are tiring and annoying for the other people around him.
 
I think every child should read Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, because even if their family is perfectly lovely and supportive of who they are and what they want to do, most people will at some point in their lives have to put up with friends, classmates, co-workers or other people, with fixed opinions about what they should be.

If you need more encouragement to read Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, a one-star Amazon review called it 'a dangerously subversive book'.

You can find out more about Louise Fitzhugh and her books on Wikipedia and at the fansite Purple Socks.

The podcast This American Life has an episode inspired by this book. You may want to read the book first though, because the podcast includes a quote which I think will have more impact if you read all that's leading up to it.

Book Review: Green Fingers, by Paul May

by *clairity*

Kate is not happy about moving to the countryside, leaving her friends behind, and having to start over at another new school, but she's just a kid, what can she do about it? She really wants her parents to be happy, but she finds reading so hard, and the teachers think she's stupid. Dad loves the new house, and insists he will be able to fix it up and make it into their ideal home, but he lacks the DIY skills and one disaster follows another. After much arguing, Mum decides she can't cope with it, and she is needed at work back in London, so she leaves.

Suddenly Kate realises that she has to do something. She has to try to learn to read and to make things better at school, and she also decides that she will do her bit towards making the new house a home and sort out the garden, which her Mum was attracted to when she first saw the house, but remains a mess. With the help of her new friends, Louise and her grandfather Walter, Kate plans to create a beautiful garden and save her family.

I read a lot of teen/YA fiction but I hadn't read any younger children's literature for a long time, and when I decided to read this short novel as it has similar themes to the YA book I am writing, I didn't expect to be absorbed by it. To my surprise I loved Green Fingers! The characterisation is great, lots of serious issues are explored but the tone is optimistic, and I kept turning the pages and cried at the end! Kate is a sympathetic, determined girl and I really enjoyed my time with her. It's nicely modern too - Kate's Mum has a job in the city that she loves, whilst her Dad works from home on his computer and takes care of the children.
I think it is just the right length, although I was sad to leave the characters and put the book down.

I think this book is aimed at 8-13 year old children, and it strikes me as a particularly good book for reading aloud. There are illustrations at the start of each section and chapter, these were drawn by Sian Bailey. Paul May has written seven other fiction books and seven non-fiction books for children, and on his website he says that Green Fingers is his favourite book. I would definitely recommend this to my own cousins!

Book Review: The Misfits, by James Howe

12-year-old overweight department store tie salesman Bobby Goodspeed and his best friends Skeezie (reformed school terror), Addie (tall, clever and female) and Joe (gay) have always been the outcasts at school. It's a situation they are all pretty accustomed to, but one day rebellious Addie brings up an idea at one of their Forum meetings: they should create a new party to run in the student elections. Things do not run as smoothly as she imagines, however, as she tries to convince the popular DuShawn Carter to run for president, and they have to go up against Brittney Hobson, who has been class president three times running. Bobby also has to deal with his relationship with his father, his co-worker Mr Kellerman, and his feelings for Kelsey, a girl in his class with a crush on Joe!

I had mixed feelings about this book. I felt it had a good, strong message - it inspired a national "No Name-Calling Week" in school in the USA - and I liked that it didn't go for the cheesy ending. I felt that Bobby was an interesting character, however, I thought that I would have liked to know more about the other members of the group and the school in general, and to see more of Bobby's emotions, it took a long time for me to feel emotionally "hooked" by the story. I think it's the type of story that would make a good film, being as focused as it is around one major event. However, there is a sequel, or 'companion', Totally Joe, from Joe's point of view (obviously), which I am looking forward to reading at some point.

I would recommend this book for 10-14 year olds, the writing isn't really sophisticated enough for older teens or adults, the message may seem a little forced to cynical minds.